[Sca-cooks] Re: rice

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Oct 6, 2005, at 2:03 PM, Devra at aol.com wrote:

>         Maybe the rice was old. Master Adamantius cooked a  
> wonderful 12th
> Night event in RI, and made a seafood rissotto, which unfortunately  
> was extremely
> crunchy. I believe that he cooked the rice for several hours, too.  
> Tasted
> really nice, if you got over the feeling of eating raw rice.
>      Devra

Yes, I was going to point out that I had also had had the Mysterious  
Waterproof Rice phenomenon occur to me. It was Blomanger of Fish, and  
it should have been wonderful, and the test batches were. I'm still  
not sure what the problem was, but for that dish, I think the thing  
to do is to start with rice pre-cooked in plain water, rather than  
cooking it in the seafood-stock-based almond milk, as I recall the  
recipe stipulated. While my preference would be to follow the recipe  
as written, there may have been some physical differences between the  
rice I used and the stuff the 15th-century cooks/authors used, which  
might account for the problem.

I actually don't think I would have called it crunchy, but it was  
distinctly al dente, as I recall, kind of like the center of a grain  
of arborio risotto, only it was throughout. More chalky. As someone  
(Urtatim?) suggested, it might have been extremely old rice.

Adamantius




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them  
eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

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